The Mills College Campus is beautiful – wide sweeping lawns, and tree-lined boulevards. It’s a tranquil place where I can picture myself reading a book in the warm sunshine, or maybe even doing interpretive dance in front of the student union – which is exactly what’s happening when I walk onto campus.

This past summer thousands of women and young people flooded over the border -- seeking to escape terrible violence in South and Central America. Many who came brought little with them, but they carry emotional baggage. And that’s where mental health counselors step in -- to help the recently arrived deal with the trauma they’ve faced, and even to help convince American courts to let them stay. But there are a lot of barriers to good mental health care for immigrants.

It’s a bright spring afternoon in Oakland’s Northgate district, and a half dozen Yemeni-American students from Oakland International High School, or OIHS, are leading a group of their teachers and counselors on a tour of places they go when they’re not in school. Outfitted in brightly colored head scarves, they’re walking to one of their first stops: the Bee Healthy Honey shop on Telegraph Avenue.

Over the past six months, student reporters from Mills College in Oakland have been tracing the path of the American dream. Jessica Toyota brings us the story of Lisa Hsia, whose Chinese parents thought very differently than she did.

If you love and respectful for your parents, then you know more than them, they push you to be Americans, but then you see them as knowing less than you. It is a little bit difficult. My relationship is good with them, but some things are out of touch. Culture definitely plays a role in that.

Over the past six months student reporters from Mills College in Oakland have been tracing the path of the American dream. Jessica Toyota brings us the story of Erika Monico, a mother who explains what she’s gained and lost by moving from Brazil and raising her daughter in the U.S.

For a lot of high school students, the best part of their day is spending time with friends. That's also the case for students with Asperger's syndrome, which is characterized by trouble with social interactions, especially in reading nonverbal cues.

Skyline is one of 15 public high schools in Oakland and the only one located in the hills. The 42-acre campus is nestled among redwoods and million dollar homes. Nearly 2,000 students attend this traditional campus and many value the diverse student body. But that wasn’t always the case.

Skyline High opened in 1961, and was almost immediately surrounded by conflict. It’s proposed attendance zone was one mile wide, ten miles long, and based entirely in the hills, which excluded students from the flatlands. This kept the school racially, as well as economically, homogenous -- despite the fact that the city’s black population nearly doubled during the previous decade.

Oakland’s Skyline High School has one of the most diverse campuses in California, with students coming from a wide range of backgrounds. That means some parents are not fluent in English, making it difficult for them to communicate with teachers and administrators. That is where the school's Family Resource Center comes in, helping to bridge the language gap with translation services.

In 2012 Skyline's Black Student Union filed a complaint charging the school with discriminating against students of color. They accused Skyline of short-shifting black students, providing lackluster support which led directly to students not graduating. A lawsuit resulted in an agreement with the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and Skyline and the Oakland Unified School District agreed to make some serious changes. Included in those reforms was a voluntary resolution plan to oversee the disciplinary methods toward African American male students.

Oakland Unified School District spokesperson Troy Flint said that in order to make sure all students succeed, OUSD needs to target and support the most vulnerable. “By most measures African American males are performing the worst, relative to other demographic groups,” he said. That is why in 2010 the Oakland Unified School District launched its African American Male Achievement project to support young black men academically.

But students from other demographic groups could also benefit from targeted programs.

For many teens in Alameda County, the library isn’t just a place to study, it’s become a space for them to get away from mounting pressures from school and their social lives and a place where they can just relax and be themselves. For example, Oakland teenagers can come to the Asian Branch once a week, for game day.

Anna Xu is a teen advisory member at the library. She and the teen advisory group brainstorm ways the library can help meet the teens’ needs.

If you head southeast from the Lakeview Library, way down to the 80s blocks of International Boulevard, be sure to take a turn at 88th to visit the Elmhurst branch of the Oakland Library. You'll have to look closely—this library is in a small converted house. Elmhurst operates like any other public library: books to check out, computers to use, and a children's program. But it's got a problem: most kids can’t get to it very easily. The Elmhurst branch is trying to fix that.

If you’ve traveled out of Oakland airport, you’ve probably seen a beautiful piece of artwork – graceful, long-legged cranes painted on the windows in Terminal 2. It’s called “Going Away, Coming Home.” It’s a piece about being of and from two places at once, about the in-between existence we inhabit in transit. By looking at it, you’d probably never imagine that the artist once risked her life to make paintings like this.

Urban Debate has existed since 1985 and has continued to evolve – making it a national and local phenomenon. The Bay Area Urban Debate League sponsored a recent tournament at UC Berkeley, where 400 Bay Area high school students showed up ready to debate.

Corner stores in Oakland are predominantly run by immigrants from the Middle East. Most of the merchants are originally from Yemen. Some estimates report that 80 percent of Bay Area convenience stores are operated by Yemenese.

One of those stores is Foothill Market on 19th and Foothill in Oakland’s Fruitvale district. The Hassan family runs it. Ali Farrad Hassan is a first generation Yemeni-American, and has been working in his uncle’s store for a few years now.

San Antonio Park stretches a full city block on each side, in a lush area near Foothill Blvd and 18th Avenue in Oakland. About 15 years ago, the park was considered a dangerous eyesore. Since then, through the help of people who care about healthy public spaces, like Grey Kolevzon it has become an important example of what can happen when people pull together to build something up.